Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

After surviving a bruising primary in part by swerving left, the presumptive Democratic nominee entered the convention still suffering from a perception of untrustworthiness and discontent on the left.

Not 2016, but 1992. Not Hillary Clinton; her husband Bill.

Story Continued Below

The memory of Bill Clinton’s divisive primary season was eclipsed by his electric convention in July of 1992, which produced the biggest poll “bounce” in history and rocketed him into first place for good. Yet the show of unity masked his weakness with left-wing populists and moderate deficit hawks–which was survivable only because of parallel divisions on the right that cost incumbent President George H.W. Bush the election and handed victory to Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton enters her convention in relatively stronger shape than her husband did his. Bill may be the superior politician in the family, but he was scraping bottom in June 1992, polling below 30 percent and coming in third place behind Bush and, the leader in some surveys, Ross Perot. Revelations of an extramarital affair, as well as accusations of draft dodging and cronyism, left a terrible first impression for a general electorate just beginning to know him.

Hillary, meanwhile, has been in the lead for months. She’s had her struggles with perceptions of untrustworthiness, but she has not succumbed to them. A known quantity with three decades in the spotlight, she doesn’t have to convince anybody that she’s up to the task of being president. And she is poised to preside over a coronation in which “unity” will be on the tip of every Democratic tongue.

But after the headiness wears off, she will still have to worry if the unity in the hall really runs deep, or if remaining rifts will allow the third-party wild cards to inflict damage. It’s happened before.

***

“I am not a member of an organized political party. I am Democrat,” Will Rogers famously remarked after Democrats had a series of early 20th century conventions requiring scores of ballots to settle on a nominee (over 100 in 1924) exposing profound ideological differences and sometimes fueling minor party candidates like Socialist Eugene Debs or Progressive Robert La Follette. After a period of relative calm mid-century (the historic civil rights battle of 1948 notwithstanding), Democratic convention chaos peaked with the bloody 1968 scrum that alienated the anti-war left and the wild and wooly 1972 affair that alienated the political center.

But ever since the 1980 convention, in which a defiant runner-up Ted Kennedy overshadowed the incumbent President Jimmy Carter, Democrats have gradually managed to render the Rogers knock obsolete. If conventions have not always been friction-free, they have ended on high notes and usually boosted the nominee’s poll numbers.

That doesn’t mean conventions ceased to cause problems for the Democrats. A recurring error has been the climatic moment that backfires soon after: Walter Mondale’s excessive candor on tax increases (‘Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did”), Michael Dukakis’ quickly disproven assertion that the election would turn on “competence” not “ideology” and John Kerry’s “reporting for duty” emphasis on his military record that failed to anticipate the subsequent “Swift Boat” attacks.

A less obvious pitfall – one that Hillary Clinton should be particularly concerned with avoiding – is letting a well-scripted convention create a false sense of unity. Take 2000. Al Gore may have swept the Democratic primaries against Sen. Bill Bradley, but in the pre-convention summer, he was feeling some left-wing heat from Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, whose poll numbers had hit eight percent.

On “Meet The Press” in May of that year, Nader tore into Gore as “a chronic political coward and the ultimate panderer,” and pilloried the Clinton-Gore administration’s record on corporate regulation “as bad or worse than under Reagan-Bush.” In July, host Tim Russert re-aired some of Nader’s attack when interviewing Gore, and noted Gore faced several Nader supporters during a high-profile town hall event. In turn, at the convention Gore adopted a populist stance, pledging to side with “the people” and fight “the powerful.”

Gore got a strong bounce of eight points out of the convention. However, his acceptance speech was light on environmental rhetoric, despite it being his long-time signature issue. Nader seized the tiny opening, relentlessly attacking Gore as being all talk and no action on the environment. The charged resonated on the left. “Gore would have to come out with some major environmental positions in order to put a dent into the Nader vibration,” said an Oregon supporter. In what would be the pivotal state of Florida, some complained that Gore, unlike Nader, didn’t oppose an proposed commercial airport near the Everglades.

After the convention, Gore stepped up his environmental focus somewhat, but it never satisfied Nader, who sent an open letter in late October criticizing environmental organizations that endorsed Gore as having a “servile mentality”

By Election Day, Gore recouped much of the left vote and Nader’s final total of three percent was well below his polling peak. But the pesky Green Party still tipped New Hampshire to Bush and Florida to the Supreme Court, proving that Gore’s seemingly unified convention failed to fully consolidate the left.

The weaknesses of the Bill Clinton’s 1992 convention are even less explored than the 2000, for understandable reasons. Biggest bounce in history. Launchpad to ultimate victory. What’s the problem?

Unlike his wife, who successfully secured the endorsement her ornery populist rival before her convention, Bill couldn’t corral Jerry Brown. The Californian came to New York with his own platform, deriding the official document drafted by the Clinton delegates as “full of gooey and imprecise language.” He seized the dais without endorsing Clinton, and while he didn’t attack the nominee by name, he said, “We have to save our souls as Democrats, return to our roots … and once again fight on the side of the people who pay the bills … I intend to fight for this party, its ideals, tonight, tomorrow, this year and every year until together we overcome.”

Brown was treated like a footnote to an otherwise exhilarating and harmonious convention. In the run-up, the choice of Gore for vice-president captivated America. It was the original political double down: eschewing the typical calculated play for geographic and ideological balance in favor of an emphasis on what made Bill Clinton a different kind of Democrat: young, Southern, moderate. Then on the last day of the convention, Clinton was handed an extraordinary gift: Perot abruptly quit, citing a “revitalized Democratic Party” on his way out the door.

Clinton did not treat the announcement a gift at first, thinking Perot had been hurting President George H. W. Bush more than him. “Damn! Ross Perot is my main man” he told campaign manager James Carville upon learning the news. But he instantly moved to win over Perot and his supporters, rewriting that night’s acceptance speech to include a fresh pitch: “I am well aware that all those millions of people who rallied to Ross Perot's cause wanted to be in an army of patriots for change. Tonight I say to them, join us, and together we will revitalize America.”

However, Perot’s cause of aggressive deficit reduction was not deeply shared by Bill Clinton, but by Clinton’s other primary rival Paul Tsongas. In the campaign, Tsongas mocked Clinton as “Pander Bear,” with Clinton’s signature “middle-class tax cut” as Exhibit A. Tsongas’ reputation for straight talk rankled Clinton, who chided him in a debate, “No one can argue with you, Paul. You're perfect." Tsongas shot back, "I'm not perfect. Just honest," jabbing Clinton’s weak spot.

By the convention, Clinton appeared to have patched up that division. Tsongas delivered a solid endorsement speech. Clinton professed support for a balanced budget in the final address. But Clinton hadn’t resolved the main tension that the Tsongas forces harped on in the primary: Clinton’s middle-class tax cut conflicted with the goal of budget balancing.

After the convention, Tsongas didn’t drop the case. In late July, Tsongas announced a bipartisan organization dedicated to deficit reduction. Perot chimed in as well, releasing a budget plan filled with stiff medicine of spending cuts and tax hikes, some squarely targeting the middle class including a gas tax increase.

Clinton saw no need to embrace Perot’s tax hikes – part of the logic of the middle-class tax cut was to erase the memory of Walter Mondale. But in late September, Perot started making noise about re-entering the race. Clinton sent a delegation to Perot to convince him otherwise, but as it had strict instructions not to make policy concessions to Perot, it was a futile mission. Perot re-entered the race on October 1st.

Then in the final stretch of the campaign, Tsongas and his Republican partner former Sen. Warren Rudman stoked the deficit reduction embers, criticizing the budget plans of both Clinton and Bush. They stopped short of backing Perot – Rudman called him the “wrong messenger” – but they praised him for putting the issue on the front burner.

It’s a common myth that Perot only siphoned off Republican votes and tipped the election to Clinton, but as MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki has shouted from the rooftops for years, the exit poll showed Perot voters were evenly split between Clinton and Bush for their second choice. (Political scientist Gerald Pomper concluded Perot may have tipped Georgia, New Hampshire and Ohio to Clinton, but giving those states to Bush wouldn’t have changed the Electoral College outcome.) Perot’s appeal also transcended ideology; he won 18 percent of the liberal vote and the conservative vote, and a touch more of the moderate vote.

Clinton still won the White House, but with only 43 percent of the vote, the fourth smallest popular vote percentage in history. The fact remains that the gangbusters convention didn’t unify his party; a significant number of Tsongas and Brown holdouts went to Perot. Clinton was just fortunate that the Republican Party was wracked with its own debilitating divisions, with Pat Buchanan wounding President Bush in the primary over breaking his “no new taxes” pledge, then dominating the convention with his infamous declaration of a “culture war” with social liberals.

Today, Hillary enters her convention in better shape than her husband at the same point. While he trailed through June, she led. Bernie Sanders has more delegate strength than Jerry Brown did, but he surrendered it by choosing not to embark on any platform floor flights. She also benefits by immediately following the most divided Republican convention since 1912.

It’s possible some rogue Bernie Sanders delegates may make some mischief on the floor. But the spotlight is more likely to be dominated by effusive prime-time praise from Sanders, fellow populist favorite Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the most popular Democrat – perhaps the most popular politician of any party – in the country, President Barack Obama.

Considering that her poll numbers have sagged a bit in July and that some Sanders voters have been sitting on the fence, four days of Philadelphia Brotherly Love, combined with backlash from Cleveland’s “Mistake By The Lake,” could well produce a major Democratic bounce. It’s quite possible, even likely, that whatever hard feelings that remain on the left, they will pale in comparison to the full-blown civil war exploding on the right.

Before any possible bounce, Hillary Clinton’s poll average in four-way trial heats including the Libertarian and Green nominees is a limp 41 percent, remarkably similar to Bill Clinton’s final vote share. It’s enough for a lead, as the third-party duo combined pulls an roughly equivalent number of votes from each major party candidate. But it’s a reminder that’s she still soft on the left, much like Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Neither went overboard trying to mend broken fences. Bill got away with it, Gore didn’t.

The lesson? Maybe Hillary can get away with tracing Bill’s path. But if she wants to minimize the risk of an upset, she can’t let a successful convention make her think she can take her eye off her left flank.